Cross-licensing

In the past, USA competing companies could not cooperate, such as in R D, without breaching antitrust laws. Patent pooling, such as collecting and cross-licensing patents, was precluded. Today the antitrust laws are reviewed, interpreted, and enforced less stringently, which permits industrial cooperation in selected and specific areas where poling does exist. This explanation is a simplistic summation to a very complicated situation. 

In the course of the past 25 years the pattern of increasing competition in the petroleum industry has stimulated research. At the same time, through wise use of the cross-licensing arrangements possible under the patent laws, immediate industry-wide use of new developments has become possible. Because licenses can be obtained at reasonable rates, even the small refiners have been able to use the latest methods without prohibitive research expense. In addition, wasteful duplication of research and development has been avoided, and the most recent knowledge has become promptly available to serve as the foundation on which further developments could be built. 

Many other market names exist for the mixture, depending on the formulation, cross-licensing, and so... 

Don t close your mind to cross-licensing patents. 

There has been and will continue to be iimovative reconstruction of the pharmaceutical industry with, for example, cross-licensing of products and expertise. Sandoz collaborated with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) in oncology. Other companies have a more acquisitive outlook. Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert for its cholesterol-lowering Lipitor, and Pharmacia merged with UpJohn-Searle for its COX-2 inhibitor. Pfizer then acquired Pharmacia-UpJohn-Searle to become the world s largest pharmaceutical company. 

If armrests and wheels produce a much more marketable product, it might be in both patentees interests to cross-license their respective patents, as neither patentee could sell the more desirable chair without an accommodation with the other. 

If one inventor receives a patent on an improvement to another inventor s already patented invention, each inventor may find himself or herself blocked from using his or her invention by the other s patent. In such a situation, not uncommon among pharmaceuticals, the two inventors usually negotiate to cross-license their patents so both can use, produce, or sell their inventions (124). 

What determines which partner gets patents resulting from the joint effort What are the cross licensing arrangements ... 

Meanwhile, DuPont succeeded in producing nylon 6/6 on an industrial scale by Carothers route. Today, the two technologies are cross-licensed and producers use both routes. 

C. Shapiro, Navigating the patent thicket cross-licenses, patent pools, and standard setting in Innovation Policy and the Economy (Eds. A. Jaffe, J. Lemer, S. Stern), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, pp. 119-150. 

Transactional alliances are established for a specific purpose, typically to improve each participant s ability to conduct its business. Cross-licensing in the pharmaceutical industry is an example. Open-ended purchase orders for specific products would be another. 

The sheer size and value of the polyethylene industry ensure that there is continued research, progress, and development in catalysis, for their potential commercial impact. Although this whole subject is not within the scope of this chapter, we mention a couple of aspects of the progress, which offer the potential to impact this industry. In 1995, DuPont introduced work, carried out with them at the University of North Carolina—via the largest patent applicafion ever in the USA. They disclosed what are described as post-metallocene catalysts. These are transition and late transition metal complexes with di-imine ligands, which form part of the DuPont Versipol technology. Such catalysts create highly branched to exceptionally linear ethylene homopolymers and linear alpha-olefins. Late transition metals offer not only the potential for the incorporation of polar comonomers, which until now has only been possible in LDPE reactors, but also their controlled sequence distribution, compared to the random composition of free radical LDPE copolymers. Such copolymers account for over 1 million tons per annum [20]. Versipol has so far only been cross-licensed and used commercially by DuPont Dow Elastomers (a former joint venture, now dissolved) in an EPDM plant. 

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